398: PlayStation Doubles Down And EA’s Sale Is Complete

**Morgan** (0:20)
Welcome to the Baunfire Gaming Podcast. I'm your host Morgan, aka Baundiesel. This is episode 398, and this week we'll be talking about Xbox's new plans, PlayStation sticking to its discless guns, EA's acquisition completes on August 4th, and much more. Be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, leave a review on Spotify or iTunes, and subscribe to the Baundiesel YouTube channel to get all of my videos, including this podcast. Thank you to everyone who supports as YouTube members or Twitch subscribers, and be sure to check out the links in the description of the episode for my other content and other ways to support.
We're kicking it off with some Xbox news. First, Microsoft has their annual financial report came out.
Of course, everyone was digging into it. All of the online accountants and financial advisors who don't know anything about those things, but have a notepad and a staff writer spot at Eurogamer or VGC, they all had opinions.
From what I actually saw and looking at it myself and trying to decipher it, I'm going to be honest, I don't know a ton about that stuff, but I like to pretend like I do, just like everyone else, and I had a Snickers, so I'm an expert. I didn't have a Snickers, but that does sound delicious.
So basically, Xbox's revenue is down to the year before, about $1.7 billion, which is a ton of money. It's still raking in a ton of cash though, and it's still the third highest revenue division at Microsoft, which is insane. It's just now, it's the third and it's by a mile, so just to be completely clear, it's there like cloud and like data services, it's like $130 billion in the year or something. The next one was like $100 billion, I think, and then Xbox was like $22 billion. So it's a big jump from the first two down to the third, but still it's doing pretty well, even with all the crazy times. And you have to consider that this fiscal year was only a few months of this like new strategy, new leadership, all that. This was mostly under the old leadership.
So specifically, Xbox was down $1.7 billion in the whole fiscal year compared to the year before, but it was still made, still pulled in about $22 billion in revenue. Sutton and Adela had a quote that said, quote, when it comes to Xbox, we are making the necessary decisions required across our content portfolio platform and operations to reset the business for long-term growth. We have the best IP in the industry and talented studios around the world, and we believe we can bring these trends together and expect to return the business growth in fiscal 2027 So that would be, I assume, by the end of June of next year, they're expecting to have turned this thing around, at least to the point of returning to growth. I don't think that they're expecting to be the top dog in a year. That's obviously not going to happen, especially when in the next 12 months, we aren't expecting things that need to change to change.
That will allow them to have cheaper hardware and things like that.
So, we'll see.
I think what sucks about these, they're publicly traded companies, so they have to release these numbers.
It's just like the trend of the games industry, and especially the people who cover it, whether it's little nobodies like me, or journalists, or content creators, or personalities, and influencers, and stuff, that you can see like financial people go nuts about how impressive the Microsoft numbers are as a whole, and how good it is for them. Compared to people who have their own agenda, little console war things, stuff like that, that really focus on like, oh no, they lost 1.7 billion, even though that's a pretty tiny percentage of their business, Microsoft as a whole, even as Xbox, like still pulling in 22 billion when their situation is and appears to be as dire as it appears to be. That seems like pretty good, all things considered.
I don't know. It's weird. And I just, I made a post a week or two ago about how like, as someone who pays a lot of attention to this stuff, maybe it would never pretend to be like the most knowledgeable or anything on it. But you know, I do pay a lot of attention to it. And it really, it's interesting where there's like three groups of people that I see feedback from on this stuff. And it's so different, right? Like I see the journalists and like the influencers just going for the most clickbaity, you know, most kind of, I'll describe it as the most annoying take on these things, right? Where it's always finding the negative because that's good for clicks on their websites that are all dying because they're all doing layoffs and none of them are, they're all afraid of losing their jobs, right? And so, you know, they're all like pumping out like 10 articles a day because it's the only way they can get enough ad revenue to justify their salary, right? And so you see that like all these super hot takes, although it's always pessimistic, it's always negative. So you see that and that makes you think one thing, right? That like trains you to believe one thing about the industry and Xbox specifically.